Jaap van Ganswijk wrote:
Perhaps the Wikipedia software could try to translate
ae and
such to the appropriate HTML abreviations like ä but
that would be risky, because it would have to know in what
language each word was written. In Dutch we have the 'oe'
as a valid combination which is not equal to 'ö', so
if Dutch and German were mixed in an article it would cause
problems.
To do this the system also needs to distinguish between an umlaut and a
diaresis. The famous painter Raphael is often spelled with a diaresis
as "Raphaël". It wouldn't do do have him automagically turned into
"Raphäl". The important thing to me is not in having the machines put
in umlauts or other accents, but having the search engine regard
spellings with or without accents as equivalent. This would be a great
help for the searcher who doesn't know if a word has an accent or
exactly what accent it has. No non-french speaking person should be
required to know about how some verbs change their accent patterns, or
the subtleties about an acute or grave accent on a final "e" in Catalan.
The uniquely German treatment of umlauted vowels can then probably be
treated with redirects.
Someone also made a comment an anglo-centric comment about foreign users
using foreign keyboards. What does this mean if I write in more than
one language? Maybe I should connect a separate keyboard for each
language. The computer should be smart enough to know that it does
things differntly when I'm on my Russian or Turkish or Devanagiri
keyboard. [;-)] .
Eclecticology
PS: At first I thought that I was replying to the list but apparently it
only went to Jaap. I suppose I'll should use the reply all when
answering to the list. -Ec